thoughts on esr

[thobbs at rectrix.cx (Timothy Hobbs)]

I just wanted to comment on one part of this:
Quoting Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>:
<snip>
> A point of disagreement is with corporations. There
are many reasons a
> large company will standardize on one vendor. The
office suites and
> email are a big part of it, but many companies have
their own
> applications. Many of these applications are written
in Visual Basic or
> Visual C++. Converting applications systems written
for Windows to
> other platforms is usually very painful. From past
experience in
> mainframes it becomes very expensive. It becomes more
important for us
> in the Linux community to try to get more mainstream
applications on
> Linux. We have the office suites and email. We lack
things like
> accounting packages. These all will come in time.
>

I came from an Enterprise Resource Planning background,
and we as erp software implementers discussed it a bit. 
The thing is that the major ERP vendors have _already_
ported their erp packages to linux (see
http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/linux/linux_over.htm
(this is a page from inside a frame, else search 
for linux on www.sap.com))

I think that even if business-critical software
providers do port their products to linux, the closed
source nature of (most) of those products still flies in
the face of esr's pitch to CIO's that "you need control
of your source so that you can change it".

For ERP software if a company _really_ needs/wants the
source they can pay extra for it, but that's not what
we're talking about ( i don't think ).

So with some of the erp/accounting software ported to
linux, linux may be installed more often but the open
source culture is not extended.  Which one is more
important?  ;)

-Tim
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